When Hype Cycles Collapse

I watched the conversation shift in real-time.

Developers who spent years talking about Ethereum and Solana suddenly stopped. The crypto cycle was supposed to deliver its next wave after the 2024 halving. Everyone waited for the surge.

It didn't come.

Bitcoin's 2024 halving defied every historical pattern. One year later, Bitcoin had rallied only 31% from its halving-day price. Compare that to previous cycles: 300% gains in the third epoch, 567% in the fourth.

The wave that was supposed to arrive never materialized. No new application captured attention. NFTs had already crashed. There was nothing to rally around.

Then AI appeared. And it existed completely outside the crypto frame.

The Migration Reveals Something About Consciousness

Developers didn't pivot from one crypto application to another. They left the entire ecosystem.

By November 2024, over 21,000 AI agent tokens had launched in a single month. Daily launches exceeded 1,000. The velocity was staggering.

This wasn't a gradual shift. This was collective attention migrating like capital seeking returns.

You want to be where something is happening. Where you can learn. Where the exciting stuff lives. Where you might make money with the new thing that will change everything.

That's what gives people meaning. The reason to get out of bed every morning. The endeavor worth pursuing.

With crypto, we were building a new financial system. Noble goal. We could solve problems with financial institutions. Fix big structural issues.

With AI, we're solving labor itself.

The distinction matters more than most people realize.

When Institutional Validation Arrives, Developers Have Already Left

In October 2025, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink declared that the financial industry stands at "the beginning of the tokenization of all assets" as the firm's Bitcoin ETF surpassed $100 billion.

By December, Fink and BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein were comparing tokenization to 1996, when Amazon was still a small online bookstore. They pointed to a 300% surge in real-world asset tokenization over 20 months.

BlackRock's $2.8 billion BUIDL tokenized money market fund now stands as the largest tokenized fund on the market.

Institutional validation arrived precisely when developers had moved on.

This pattern repeats across every technological cycle. The institutions show up to validate infrastructure after the builders have already migrated to the next frontier.

Fink himself acknowledged this: "At first it was hard for the financial world—including us—to see the big idea. Tokenization was tangled up in the crypto boom, which often looked like speculation."

Translation: we couldn't see what was real until the hype collapsed.

The Boom-Bust Pattern Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Every cycle produces a bubble. The dot-com bubble. The crypto bubble. Now potentially an AI bubble.

There's always something we're excited about. Something the news fills with breathless coverage. Something that feels like it will change everything.

At Yale's CEO Summit in June 2025, 40% of polled CEOs believed a correction was imminent in AI investment. The other 60% saw no overinvestment problem.

The split reveals the tension: we need hype to fund infrastructure. Then we need disillusionment to separate signal from noise.

AI captured close to 50% of all global funding in 2025, up from 34% in 2024. Foundation model companies raised $80 billion in 2025 alone—more than double the $31 billion raised in 2024.

OpenAI and Anthropic together captured 14% of global venture investment this year.

This concentration of capital either funds genuine civilizational infrastructure or inflates a bubble that will pop when the next thing arrives.

The question isn't whether cycles happen. The question is what remains after the hype collapses.

What Technology Actually Leaves Behind

Crypto left us with tokenization infrastructure. The distributed asset market now represents $18.41 billion, with $391.55 billion in represented asset value. Projections suggest tokenized real-world assets could reach $16 trillion by 2030.

Today's revolution becomes tomorrow's plumbing.

The most telling signal of the shift: Bitcoin miners are abandoning crypto for AI infrastructure. Mining revenue is projected to plummet from 85% of total revenue in early 2025 to less than 20% by the end of 2026 for companies that secured AI contracts.

These companies can generate 80% to 90% operating margins from AI deals, compared to the thin margins of Bitcoin mining operations.

By October 2025, bitcoin miners had announced $65 billion worth of contracts with major technology companies and cloud service providers.

When the miners leave, the infrastructure conversation is over.

The Reflective Loop We're Building

Here's what makes this cycle different: we're excited about building something that can build itself.

I code with AI tools like Claude and Gemini daily. I'm working on tools that can do the work I'm excited about. The technology I'm building can eventually replace the labor of building it.

This creates a reflective loop that previous cycles didn't have.

Crypto promised financial freedom but required human builders to maintain the infrastructure. AI promises to eliminate the need for builders entirely.

The developers building with AI today face an existential question: are we creating tools for human flourishing or just automating ourselves out of meaning?

When the next bubble arrives, will AI do all the work? Will the chase for meaning require humans at all?

What Becomes of Us When the Thing Stops Being New

The technology itself isn't the point. It's the meaning-making mechanism.

If meaning comes from chasing the new exciting stuff that will change everything, what happens when the thing stops being new?

Does the work itself ever become the meaning, or is it always the chase?

I've watched this pattern enough times to recognize what's happening. The velocity of attention migration reveals something about human consciousness that most trend analysis misses.

We're not just building technologies. We're building and abandoning meaning structures.

Crypto became infrastructure the moment developers stopped talking about it. AI will follow the same trajectory unless it represents something fundamentally different.

The distinction between crypto and AI might be this: crypto promised freedom from institutions. AI delivers actual labor replacement.

One was aspirational. The other is inevitable.

But inevitability doesn't answer the deeper question: when machines solve scarcity, what becomes of human purpose?

The hype will collapse. The cycle will turn. Something new will capture collective attention.

What remains after the collapse reveals what was real all along.

I'm building with AI now. I'm inside this cycle, watching it unfold. I'm also watching myself within it, observing what happens when the thing I'm excited about can eventually do the work of being excited.

The question isn't whether AI is a bubble. The question is what we're building toward when the bubble pops.

Are we creating infrastructure for human flourishing, or just more sophisticated dependency?

The answer will reveal itself the same way it always does: when the developers stop talking about it and move on to the next thing.

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Read more at roelsmelt.com

Disrupt Consciousness explores the collision between exponential technologies and human awakening. I write from the intersection of three decades of business leadership, deep Vipassana practice, and daily AI-native creation. This is pattern recognition across technological inevitability and consciousness inquiry—building the intellectual infrastructure for a world that realizes freedom only after machines stop demanding our labor.